EDITOR'S CHOICE -- SCOTT SUTTELL

Poverty outmigrates from cities to suburbs

A new Brookings Institution report could change the way we think about poverty and the suburbs, according to this analysis by TheAtlanticCities.com.

The report, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” has some eye-catching numbers.

“Over the last decade, suburbs have increasingly become home to America's poor,” TheAtlanticCities.com reports in summarizing the Brookings data.

“Between 2000 and 2011, the population living in American cities below the poverty line increased by 29 percent,” the website says. “During that same time, across the country in the suburbs of metropolitan areas as diverse as Atlanta and Detroit and Salt Lake City, the ranks of the poor grew by 64 percent. Today, more poor people live in the suburbs (16.4 million of them) than in U.S. cities (13.4 million), despite the perception that poverty remains a uniquely urban problem.”

In the city of Cleveland, the number of residents living below the poverty line grew 7.3% from 2000 to 2011. In the suburbs, though, the increase in people living in poverty rose 85.2%.

The city's poverty rate is quite high, at 34.3%, and the suburban poverty rate now is 11.7%. There are 324,040 people in the Cleveland area who live in poverty, Brookings reports.

The numbers are similar for Akron, where the city poverty rate rose 50.8% in the past decade but the suburban rate was up 96.9%. The overall poverty rate is 28.9% for city of Akron residents and 11.8% for suburban Akron residents. There are 113,671 Akron-area residents living in poverty, the Brookings data show.

This and that

We're not losers:The New York Times runs two letters from readers in reponse to an essay last week about Cleveland's pro sports teams, titled, “Disappointing fans since '64.”

He writes: “Cleveland is privileged in North America to have three major professional sports teams. Were Clevelanders any happier during the three years without an N.F.L. team than with a losing team? Cleveland has a world-class orchestra, a top art museum, the Rock and Roll and Pro Football Halls of Fame, a remarkable lakefront and wonderful parks. Stop thinking about what you don't have and be grateful for what you do have.”

And former Clevelander Sandra Genelius, now in New York, writes, “Despite our shared agony, Cleveland sports fans — and there are many more of us than you might think — have a stubborn optimism that allows us to feel hopeful for our beloved Indians, Browns and Cavaliers each year, usually before their seasons begin, and sometimes for only a few days.”

She concludes, “In this age of sports superstars with hugely overblown egos, enormous salaries and dubious lifestyles, we Cleveland fans have never experienced arrogance. But we live for the day that we will.”

“News from two of the country's less developed shale plays in Colorado and Ohio last week offer a reality check for the wave of euphoria that has washed across the industry,” the news service says. “The stumbles mark a break from the past few years, when nearly every new project was an overnight success and output grew and grew.”

Last week, Ohio released annual data on 2012 Utica shale production “that showed the state pumped less than 700,000 barrels of oil from its shale wells — barely enough to fill a small oil tanker,” according to Reuters. “North Dakota's Bakken shale pumps more than that every day. Even state officials said it the result was 'lower than initially estimated.'"

Meanwhile, NuStar Energy LP said it would shelve a plan to reverse a pair of underused refined products pipelines to ship crude from Colorado's Niobrara shale oil play to Texas, Reuters reports. It failed, twice, to garner enough commitments from potential customers to justify investing in the conversion.

“Neither development was a surprise to industry experts, and both were likely affected by extenuating circumstances,” according to Reuters. “Yet taken together they offered a sign that the flush of enthusiasm and rush of investment that piled into shale fields from one coast to the other has hit a curve. While the basic technologies of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling was enough to coax an unexpected gusher of oil from shale rock in many regions, these more challenging seams may require incremental innovation to unlock.”

Quite a life story: With the last name “Ratner” and a youth spent in Cleveland, you'd guess that Austin Ratner is in the real estate business. But he's staking out a different career path, according to this profile in The New York Times.

Mr. Ratner, 41, “the most artsy member of the real estate clan,” has written a new novel, “In the Land of the Living,” that is drawing a lot of attention in the literary world — enough for the author to get star treatment in the story, at least.

“Mr. Ratner, who combines the boyish handsomeness of Clark Kent with the nebbishness of Woody Allen, stood at the rostrum (of a bookstore for a reading),” the story notes. “His glasses were thick; his hair neatly combed. His book, heavily annotated, lay open in front of him.”

He is “both a Ratner and not a Ratner,” The Times says. “Eleven days shy of his third birthday, his biological father, a Cleveland hematologist named Norman Gordon, died of lymphoma at age 29. A few years later, his mother married James Ratner, Bruce Ratner's cousin and a Cleveland real estate mogul, and the boy was adopted.”

The autobiographical novel “chronicles the pervading sense of loss,” according to The Times.

Like Leo Auberon, the book's protagonist, Mr. Ratner has “spent his life trying both to live up to his father's memory and almost, but not quite, realizing how quixotic the quest was,” the newspaper says. “Like Leo, he grew up in the affluent Cleveland neighborhood of Shaker Heights, buried in books and shrouded in the sense of perpetual mourning familiar to any Cleveland sports fan.”

Mr. Ratner tells the newspaper, “Losing is the only narrative we have.”

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